


Waking the Dead

by onstraysod



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fix-It - Partially, It started as a creepy Gothic fic, M/M, One Shot, and turned into angst, with a lining of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 21:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: In a small cottage in Scotland, two men find themselves unable to sleep. The dead won't let them rest.





	Waking the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> caligularib on Tumblr requested "Waking the Dead" for Fitzjames and/or Crozier from my list of Gothic-themed prompts. I intended to write a few paragraphs, but I clearly got a bit carried away.

He could lay there no longer, listening for voices in the wind, wondering what those voices might say. James pulled himself upright, untangled his long legs from the blankets, and stood, fetching the lantern still burning on the bureau. If it was to be one of those nights, he might as well pass the sleepless hours upright, in a different room: one in which the walls didn’t feel like they were slowly closing in.

The glass plates in the windows trembled with the wind’s onslaught, the planks creaked beneath his feet. He half-listened, as he always did, for the tolling of the ship’s bell, sounding out the watches. But of course there were no watches now, and no ship’s bell here to ring them. 

“Can’t sleep?”

Francis sat alone in the den, in one of the chairs arranged in a semi-circle around the hearth, where the fire was banked high and burning briskly. It was symptomatic, James thought, of what they had endured: that they all wanted to sit as close to the fire as possible and keep it burning all the night through.

“You say that with an astonishing lack of irony for a man awake to _observe_ me not sleeping.”

Francis laughed softly. “Well, you know me.”

“I like to think I do.”

They were just words. James was certain he knew Francis, knew him better than most people would ever know another. All eight of them shared that deep understanding, an almost psychic sympathy forged by a degree of suffering few others could ever comprehend. But command was a special burden both he and Francis had borne, and through its distorting lens they saw one another in a particular light. By it they could pick out every line leadership had etched into the other man’s face.

James sat in the chair beside Francis’s, tilting his head toward the fire, letting the warmth of it seep beneath his skin. What a luxury that was. In some other, half-forgotten lifetime, he’d slept in four-poster beds in country estates, been feted in palaces built of marble and papered with gold. This stone cottage had but six rooms, plain whitewashed walls, and a leaky roof, but to James it was a paradise. From time to time he looked into a mirror and didn’t recognize the humble man he saw.

“Is it regret, James?” Francis asked, his voice soft against the melody of crackling logs. “Is that what keeps you awake?”

“Regret? _Singular?_ ” James scoffed. “I would count myself a fortunate man indeed if I had but one.”

“But you know the one I speak of now.” The firelight glittered in Francis’s eyes. “Our decision. To hide ourselves away.”

They had decided upon it during that first winter spent with the Netsilik, when the Lady’s people had nursed back their strength with seal meat and blubber. They had debated it together, argued it back and forth, examined it from every angle. But much of the discussion had been playacting, someone for the sake of contention taking on the devil’s advocacy. They all knew what would await the only eight survivors of the doomed Franklin Expedition back in England. 

For a time they would be hailed as heroes, or martyrs, or something pitiable in between: festooned in medals and sympathy, taken to meet the queen. Then, when the press and public grew bored, the accolades would morph into accusations and recriminations, the questions would be asked for which they could give no answer. Their evasions would be met with suspicion, their very survival seen as a mark of cowardice and shame, and if they were fortunate they might be able to crawl ignominiously away, to live in limbo between obscurity and notoriety. That was no place to heal.

“No Francis,” James said after a moment, fingers absently tracing the scar of the bullet hole in his left arm beneath the fabric of his shirt. “That’s not what I regret.”

In the early autumn of 1849, when eight haggard, dirty, emaciated men had staggered into the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Resolution, the names they’d croaked out of parched throats matched none listed on the rolls of _HMS Erebus_ and _Terror_. They had formed their own small company, they said, disembarked from a whaler in the Bay two years before to prospect and trap. But those wild wastes had defeated them. Swathed in caribou fur and their own unkempt hair, they had borne no resemblance to Royal Navy officers, much less to the etchings of daguerreotypes reproduced in newsprint, and the Company men had seen too many avaricious fools to doubt them. 

Reaching the Bay in the summer of 1850, they’d purchased berths on a whaler bound for Scotland with some of the expedition’s gold that Fitzjames had carried from the abandoned ships, secreted away on his person. And so they’d made their way, eventually, to Inveraray, to this simple stone cottage owned by some distant relation of the Goodsir family, left uninhabited when that bachelor had died without an heir. Tucked into a shallow dell at the top of a hill overlooking Loch Fyne, it was isolated and unassuming and exactly what they needed. More than a house, it was a nursemaid and a nest: not for hatchlings, but for half-dead birds with broken wings.

Francis leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “What then? Tell me. There’s nothing you can’t tell me, James.”

James lifted his hands, turned them about in the fire’s golden gleam. “There’s still flesh on my bones, Francis. A stone more of it, at least, since we returned. I came so close to death back there, I could feel its breath on my neck. Yet I’m still here.”

“And I, for one, am very glad of it.” Francis reached over and grasped James’s hand. His grip was warm and firm. “But I swear to you, James, if you’re suggesting that having survived is something you feel the need to regret, I’m going to hit you again, and this time hard enough to break that beautiful jaw of yours.”

James laughed softly. “I don’t doubt it. But no, Francis, it’s not the surviving I regret.” James paused, swallowing down the tremor that threatened to shake loose all his control. “It’s the living.”

Francis’s brow was a mass of creases. “The living?”

“There’s a difference between living and surviving. I never really realized it before. Surviving is continuing to draw breath, to move, to exist even when the existence is comprised of nothing but pain. Surviving is ticking off every new sunrise, whether you want it to come or you don’t. But living…” He drew a deep breath and met the other man’s eyes. He’d been staring at Francis’s hand, the neat way it nestled around his own. “Living is anticipating each new day. Living is feeling something inside of you again, something that isn’t a dead weight of nothingness. Living is… living is everything you make me feel, Francis.” He turned his hand in Francis’s grasp, so that their palms slotted together and their fingers interlaced. 

“But that’s the trouble, don’t you see?” James continued, forcing out the words, though his voice had gone hoarse and his breath seemed to stick in his throat. They didn’t want him to speak. “Every time I laugh I’m waking the dead. I see them, Francis. They crowd around me, and I know them still, though their flesh is sunken and stretched, their lips shriveled back from their teeth, their eyes nothing but empty holes. Le Vesconte. Des Voeux. Fairholme. They come to accuse me, to grasp and claw at me, and their hands… Their hands are just bones. But they’re still hungry.”

He saw the concern in Francis’s eyes and he wanted to shrink from it, to push his body back into the shadows at the edges of the room. But the older man only held him harder, leaving his chair to kneel at James’s feet and grasp his other hand. “Where do you see them, James?”

He turned his gaze away from Francis, looking at the far wall where the glass rattled in its casement. “Here. Every night they come to the windows. Drawn to the light.”

Francis rose slowly, unlacing his fingers from James’s. He walked over to the nearest window and drew back the chintz curtain. “There’s nothing here, James.” His voice held no reproach, only comfort. “Just the wind and the rain.”

James nodded. “And yet I see them. I see them everywhere. Sometimes I see them most when we’re all gathered in here together, and the lights are brightly burning, and our stomachs are filled with good food.” He glanced at the closed door on the other side of the room. Behind it, down a short corridor, the other men slept - or lay awake, conversing with their own demons. Blanky and Goodsir, Little and Jopson, Bridgens and Peglar. “They wouldn’t care so much if we were merely surviving, Francis. But we’re living. Barely, maybe. But each day, a little more.”

“Then let’s keep living.” Francis came away from the window and knelt again in front of James. Their hands met immediately, instinctively. “The more we live, the more we find some joy in each new day, the further we move from the dead.” He kissed James’s knuckles reverently, then laid his cheek against the back of his hand. “You taught me that. At the moment I should have been at my lowest point, given wholly over to despair, you gave me a reason to fight. You still do. I don’t believe the dead resent the living, James. There’s not a day I don’t think of them too, not a day I don’t imagine what I might have done differently. How I might have convinced more of the men to trust Silna, or— or put an end sooner to that snake Hickey. But I don’t believe the lost begrudge us a single meal, James, or the warmth of a fire, or good fellowship. I refuse to believe it. And I refuse to let them steal your peace.”

James smiled sadly, and brushed the fingers of his free hand through Francis’s sandy hair. “You can’t exorcise the world of all our problems, Francis.”

“Perhaps not. But I can damn well try.”

He rose again and went around to the back of James’s chair, leaning down over the back to put his arms around the other man and nuzzle his face in the crook of James’s neck. James put his hands over Francis’s and closed his eyes, relaxing into the comfort of his warmth and nearness. For a moment, the wraiths were held at bay.

“Perhaps I should not wish them away,” James murmured, leaning against Francis. “Perhaps I owe them their presence here. They have followed us such a very long way.” He was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “No. No, I’m wrong about that. I say they’ve followed us, but they haven’t had that far to come.” He turned his head to look into Francis’s eyes. “We only think we’ve crossed the ocean, Francis, but we’re still there. We’re still on that island. And I don’t believe we’ll ever really leave.”

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't completely thought out the logistics of how these eight escaped from King William Island, but I might revisit that - and their home together in Scotland - in the future.


End file.
